How I create… with writer Elaine Castillo

These are just some of the wise words of Elaine Castillo, a San Francisco Bay Area born writer once acclaimed as one of ‘the planet’s most exciting young people’, by The Financial Times. 

Following her studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and here in London at Goldsmiths, Castillo published her debut novel, the much-acclaimed America is Not the Heart, in 2018. 

A fixture on numerous ‘Book of the Year’ lists and a finalist for prizes including the Elle Big Book Award, the Center for Fiction Prize, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize, America is Not the Heart, follows three generations of women from one immigrant Philippine family as they try to reconcile the home they left behind with the life they’re building in America.

Ahead of the July 2025 publication of her second novel, Moderation – an exploration of real love in an increasingly virtual world – and an appearance here at the Southbank Centre to discuss it as part of ESEA Lit Fest withIn our new ESEA Encounters series, Castillo kindly found time to offer this insight into her creative process. 

When and where do you find yourself at your most creative?

I don’t think it’s a case of there being a particular time or place where I feel most creative, but particular times and places and circumstances that are more conducive to the labour of creating. You can be overflowing with ideas, but if the circumstances of your life don’t permit the adequate resources to do something with those ideas, the outcome is that one can be creative – internally, emotionally, intellectually – without being materially able to create. 

Of course, conviction and obsession and personal sacrifice can surmount those circumstances, as they often do, as many working-class artists have shown and often at great cost, but it shouldn’t have to be that way. Which is one of the reasons why funding arts, education and literacy organisations is so important – and why the systematic dismantling of organisations like the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, by the administration under which I live as an American – is so ghoulishly fascist. 

But like most people who find themselves compelled to devote their lives to making art, that call can come from anywhere; when I was a kid borrowing library books, when I walk my dog, when I’m in a hotel room on tour in another country, when I’m in a hospital room with a family member I’ve decided I’ll never see again, when I’m re-watching Kenji Mizugochi’s Sansho the Bailiff. In other words, when material and existential circumstances converge such that I’m able to fully live my human life, and so make art in it. In increasingly authoritarian times, I don’t take such circumstances for granted.

How do you know when an idea is worth developing into something more?

When I’m afraid of doing it, but can’t think about doing anything else.

Which tools are key to your creative process?

Not a tool, but certainly key to my creative process, if not overall happiness, is feeling my dog exist gently beside me. Sometimes not so gently – much of my most recent novel was written with one hand while my dog insisted I use the other hand to play tug with his favourite crocodile toy.

Other not-quite-tools, but certainly keys: true and abiding love, of person and animal; long periods of hermitude with said person and animal; grand films; old books; a nourishing meal; a life-giving group chat about anything but writing; bravery; not being a regular on social media.

Who are you creating your work for, and how free are you to create the work you want to create?

As a kid, my writing life was deeply private; there was only one person, my father, who ever read anything I wrote; the same person who gave me my first book and turned me into a reader and writer. Under his great protective wing, with only him and myself as imagined readers, I wrote freely and wildly into what felt like an eternally benevolent universe. And nearly 20 years after his death, the gift of writing that way is still with me.

But now I also find myself writing towards people who are open to the possibility of being transformed – liberated and deepened by the world. I don’t mean just by art, and certainly not just by my art. I mean only that I write now towards the old concept of metanoia, a concept that was unfortunately co-opted by Christian theology, which incorrectly defined metanoia as conversion or repentance, thus introducing religious guilt into the equation. That’s not what I’m talking about. And that’s not what metanoia is: meta, after, change, beyond, and noein or noos, mental perception, mind.

Metanoia is the fundamental shift of mind that changes one’s entire life, one’s way of looking at the world, as a result of a critical, vulnerable encounter with something in the world. Metanoia, as a concept, is often accompanied by kairos, or opportunity: in figurative art, they’re usually painted together, with Kairos as a fleeting beautiful youth, and Metanoia as a shadowy, melancholy elder. They represent the tremulous moments in our lives that appear and offer the opportunity for profound change and re-framing – and the regret of potentially missing those moments, letting the possibility pass us by. 

A work of art that truly connects to us and changes our lives, or even inspires us to change the lives of those around us, is an opportunity for metanoia. So is falling in love; a kind word when least expected; a generous stranger; the final failure of an unloving relation; choosing a refusal, when acquiescence would be easier. Fascists nowadays want you to think that nothing can change, no one can change, that the only changes that should be implemented ought to be nostalgic, ever rearward – all while they effect the most sweeping structural changes in the interest of hoarding stolen wealth and meting out fear to those who would object. Don’t let the only people who believe in transformation be the people who only seek to transform things for our collective immiseration.

As for how free I feel to create the work I want to create: given the fragility of freedom, courage is a more important lever.

How do you stay disciplined, and dedicated to your work?

I’m an Earth sign, I’ve quit drinking, and I love what I do. The first two answers are pithy, but the third one isn’t. When I say I love what I do, I’m thinking of love as a galvanizing, concentrating force – one that makes what you do, and why you do it, come viscerally alive with meaning, like in the Clifton Fadiman foreword to my old Maude translation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace (purchased as a teenager, with my father, in a secondhand bookshop that has since closed down):

‘Tolstoy’s love for his characters in War and Peace is very different from the mystic and, some would say, morbid sentimentality of his later years. It is more like the enthusiasm of a young man for everything he sees about him during the period of his greatest vigour. It is not Christian tolerance or loftiness of soul. Indeed, it does not seem ethically based at all but is rather a product of that large animal serenity which at this epoch of his life formed the base of Tolstoy’s character. He knows a great deal but it is his enormous capacity to love what he knows that makes his knowledge live for us.’

That foreword was written in 1942, and in his analysis of Tolstoy’s critique of Napoleon – and rejection of Hegel’s great-man theory – Fadiman draws a sharp and urgent parallel between Napoleon and the Hitler of his own day: their dictatorial character, their ‘low vengefulness, a pervasive resentment manifesting itself in strange outbursts of fury, savage threats, loss of temper’. It is impossible to reread Fadiman’s foreword in 2025 without extending the line he drew from Napoleon to Hitler, now to Trump and the other low, vengeful autocrats and fascists on the rise around the world.

‘Napoleon’s dream died with his dying legions in the snow. Hitler’s dream – the same vision, dreamed by a people instead of a single tyrant – is by no means dead. We do not yet know (unless faith is knowledge), whether Hitler will retrace completely the mighty Napoleonic parabola or whether he will succeed temporarily in his nightmare design of covering our planet with an Egyptian night. If he should fail, a new Tolstoy may arise fifty years hence to chronicle the vast drama of his rise and fall. If he should succeed, that new Tolstoy will not arise. For there will be no novelists and no poets. The humane and philosophic view of life from which supreme works of art spring will have been blotted out.’

What do you do when you hit a wall; when you feel unmotivated or uninspired? How do you overcome this?

There are many ways one can hit a wall, and each one deserves its own answer. Are you hitting a wall because you just don’t want to write? Then stop. Are you hitting a wall because you don’t have any ideas? Walk away, take a break, take months, take years. Renew your mind, be a person, grieve your dead, watch strange films, read long books, rescue an animal, help smuggle historical documents out of authoritarian countries seeking to censor or destroy them, cook without posting photos of your meals. These are all things I’ve done when I couldn’t write, so I speak wryly, from experience.

Are you hitting a wall because you have an idea, but you’re afraid of writing it? That’s a good sign, and often the way to get through it – besides interrogating why exactly it scares you – is: keep going. Are you hitting a wall because you have an idea, you’re writing it, but you’re afraid it won’t be any good? That’s also a good sign, and again, the way to figure things out – besides interrogating why exactly not being good scares you – is: keep going. Ultimately there is nothing wrong with stopping, and there is nothing wrong with keeping going, and different walls will require different doors, and you’ll have to know and trust yourself enough to discern which door you need at which moment. That last part, I can’t help with.

What is wrong is believing that every single word you put down must be the most pristine perfect final word anyone has ever written on the subject, and if you don’t manage to reach in one fell swoop the summit of your artistic dreams, you will be a failure. That is very stupid, and cruel. Don’t be that stupid, or cruel.

Who do you look to for feedback?

My gut, and when I’m still in the ideas phase, my partner of over twenty years. Then, once a work of some substance can be shown, my agent Emma Paterson and my editors Laura Tisdel and James Roxburgh, all of whom I’ve known and trusted for over a decade. 

How different is your creative process now to when you first began as an artist?

I know now that every work of art you make teaches you how to be the artist to make it. And while the lessons accrue, they aren’t always neatly transferable, and sometimes in fact are contradictory. The bad thing about that is, every work of art can feel like your first one. The good thing about that is, every work of art can feel like your first one.

For my first novel, I wrote a thousand-page first draft because I felt like I needed to produce the whole world of my novel, in order to know, and therefore find, the book in it. For a while I thought that was just how I worked. But with my second novel, I wanted to challenge myself to do something else – to work less with a chisel, and more with a scalpel. To let myself (and my characters) not know certain things, and work from there. Who knows what the process will be next time?

What does success feel like?

Feeling like I’ve done what I needed to do in my work so my soul sits right with it. Alternately, coming home from a 20 minute trip to the grocery store and being tackled in a tornado of love by a rescue German shepherd. That’s true fulfilment and success.

Is there a piece of advice you’ve received that you often find yourself returning to?

To turn the question around, I’ll share a piece of advice I gave to someone else recently: use your strengths, and play to your weaknesses. By that, I mean you will of course have things you naturally gravitate towards, as an artist. Places and stories that are naturally familiar to you, mediums that feel like home, a rhythm that flows easily, preoccupations that have haunted you for years.

But at the same time, there will also be practices you’ll find intimidating and difficult; places that feel like only monsters reside there; stories whose endings you can’t predict because you’ve always shut the book before it gets to that part; rhythms that make you feel not natural and elegant but awkward, exposed.

Both are necessary. If you only lean on your strengths, you’ll never grow, and you’ll go around in comforting little self-congratulatory circles with your art. But if you only seek to conquer your weaknesses, you’ll only ever learn how to work in a reactionary mode – making art to prove something, to snuff out something weak at your core, running from the foundation of your own making. Moving between these two is what builds a soul. It’s also pretty good for art.

What’s the most recent thing you learned about yourself through your work?

That transformation is possible. And that it’s not all I am.

How do you know when you’re done?

When you think ‘If I just change one more thing, it’ll be perfect’. That’s when you stop, right before you change that one thing.

Usually by the time you’re in that part of the writing, you’re starting to spiral and lose perspective; what you’re really worried about is the vulnerability of being finally legible, of your work and self being exposed. And sure, maybe there’s one more thing you can do, and God knows I’ve emailed editors asking to change two commas, but letting go of the idea that you can do one more thing to attain perfection is what allows you to be done with a work. 

Because ultimately every work is a time capsule; it’s what you were able to create at that moment, until someone called time. If you never call time, you’ll never publish anything, because of course, we can work on things forever, alter them forever, grow with them forever. And that’s fine, if that’s what you so wish. But if you want your work to have a life beyond you, in the world, then at some point you need to say ‘I’m ready to let this go as is’. And make your peace with whatever comes after that, which is beyond you – as all art that connects with others should be.